It is an incredibly happy day, my beloved blog Occam's Razor is ten years old!

In dogital years, it seems to be an unbelievable amount of time to try and stay relevant and valuable. I've written a post with four stories: The story in numbers, the story of my decade, the story of three early choices and the story of benefits to me.

Egypt seems to be the winner, owing two million of the 16 mil owed overall. The best insights of course come from drilling down. Just one license plate, 001THD racked up $110 k in fines (now at $223k with penalties). In case you were wondering, that's 1,985 tickets by a single car. #omg 126 of those were for blocking hydrants.

If you ask the government, or indeed even journalists, why is the experience at an airport so tortured for most of us, and getting worse (!), they will give you a million reasons. Many of these will be connected to their personal experiences or biases.

Yet, if you are willing to look at the data it is not such a complicated thing to figure out. See below....

It shares five simple, honestly simple, strategies you can use to bring massive focus to the work you do as an Analyst, as a Marketer, in order to ensure that your worth is recognized by the company (by ensuring everything you do is worth doing).

Yes, it is easier to do the things we are asked to and then bitch about them. But, life is too short for that. Make a difference, or go home.

It is important to point out that simple does not mean easy, though some people conflate the two. Simple means easy to understand and know. Then, depending on your skillset, depending on where your company is, the solutions might be a little easy or a little hard.

You know at some level that state taxes change across states, unlike federal which are same no matter what. But. I don't think we really internalize by just how much states differ.

Some have flat tax, others have percentage of income, others still have progressive tax systems (high earners pay way more), and so on and so forth.

The below handy chart gives you a sense for how massively different things are depending on where you are. The black dot is median income group (top 50%) and the pink dot is the highest income group (the top 0.1%!).

California and Hawaii have the highest taxes, with the steepest curves (so very high taxes on top 0.1%).

Illionis, Indiana and Pennsylvania have flat taxes. Does this have anything to do with the reality that these taxes are currently caught up some of the worst budget messes in the US at the moment?

The unbeatable star of the show is Alabama. Taxes actually go down for the middle class, rich and then super rich. Alabama has one of the highest rates of poverty in the US (it is ranked #4 in highest poverty rate).

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It is amazing that it's population allows this to happen (and RABIDLY votes for the politicians who deliver this poverty).

Bloomberg's analysis is interactive, you can play with single and married rates, you can look at more drill downs. Have fun with it here:

What business are you in as an Analyst, or anyone who deals with numbers? What's your value to the company, your salary and how quickly can you be replaced?

My latest newsletter, The Marketing-Analytics Intersect, shares definitions of each of these categories and answers those three questions for you. It is a great way for you to figure out if you want to be in the data, information, knowledge, insight or wisdom business.

But. We do have data to fall back on, thanks to the US government. The question asked is: "During the past 30 days, on the days when you drank, about how many drinks did you drink on the average?

A 12-ounce beer, a 5-ounce glass of wine, and a shot of liquor are each considered a drink.

Below are the slices for Females and Males (huge differences) and Hispanics and Asians.

If they drink, it turns out Asians, Male or Female, drink a lot less than Hispanics (or other categories). For Hispanic Males, the bottom of the distribution is heavier than Asians (or any other categories).

We will all learn the most if we keep politics out of this. Digest this purely as a lesson in data visualization.

Someone shared the graphs you see at the very top below with me. We all want to know who is lying more! But, I felt using a line graph was a sub-optimal choice as the data represented is not really a trend.

The graph would look a lot better as a bar chart, the problem is there are too many points of data. We'll end up with something unreadable quickly.

I thought a table will do just fine, combined with conditional formatting. Still, there were two ways to do this (a challenge we all deal with on a day to day basis).

The first table visualizes who is the "winner" of each category. For example, Mr. Trump is the "winner" of Pants on Fire (big surprise! :)). I was surprised Ms. Clinton is the winner of the True category (I would have expected Mr. Sanders).

Another lens to bring to this is to look at how each candidate is doing. I experimented with various kinds of conditional formatting. I ended up with the third one you see. I worry that the green implies good, but in this case it simply implies where the candidate is most at. The table is not implying the Mr. Trump and Mr. Cruz are doing great, it is simply saying Mr. Trump and Mr. Cruz tend to be in the False section in a majority of their statements (Mr. Trump "beating" Mr. Cruz in that category by nine points).

The best insight will come from both the tables, sadly that is hard for most people to do (they want simple answers to complex things). Hence, I'm not totally delighted with both but I would humbly suggest that either is better than the original.